“Thrilled,” he commented wryly.
Scowling, she looked him in the eye. “One thing about you I’ve noticed hasn’t changed.”
“Oh?”
“You’re still annoying as hell.”
He grinned. “I prefer to think of myself as a good jump-start to your metabolism.”
“You wish,” she scoffed, but she had to bite back a chuckle.
There were times, though she would rather eat dirt than admit it, when having Ronnie around again reminded her of what she’d felt like when she was totally and completely alive. To her chagrin she hadn’t felt that way—not even once—since he’d left.
She put such thoughts out of her mind.
Annie wasn’t sure what made her happier, being home again or seeing her mom and dad under the same roof and making a genuine attempt to get along, even if they were only doing it for her sake.
They’d gotten home just before lunchtime, and her mom had insisted they all sit down together for sandwiches and tea. She’d made turkey on whole-grain bread, then cut them diagonally into quarters, the way Annie had liked them when she was little. Instinctively, she’d known to put the sections on a plate in the middle of the table, rather than placing a huge sandwich in front of Annie.
Annie knew both of her parents were watching her like a hawk as she took one little section and put it on her plate, then added a tiny scoop of her mom’s potato salad. There had been a time when she could have eaten the whole bowl, but a taste was about all she could manage now without wanting to run from the table and hurl. Still, it was progress, and she guessed from their expressions that her mom and dad got that. To her chagrin, Annie also knew that Lacy had given them a very precise list of what she was to eat and at what time, every single day. The regimen wasn’t going to change just because she was out from under the watchful eye of the nurses at the hospital.
“Erik sent over some of his cinnamon ice cream for later,” her mom told her. “He thought maybe we could have that when everyone drops by.”
“Awesome,” Annie said, surprised that the idea actually held some appeal. Erik’s homemade ice cream was amazing. When he’d been working on getting the recipe down pat at the restaurant, Annie had only tasted it, but she bet her mom had eaten five gallons. “You didn’t invite a lot of people, did you?”
“Just the ones we talked about,” her mom assured her. “And they won’t stay long. They’re coming around seven, after dinner, just the way you wanted.”
“Thanks.” She took a bite of the sandwich and forced herself to swallow. To her surprise, it tasted pretty good, better than the sandwiches in the hospital, somehow. Maybe because her mom had made it. Annie took another bite.
“You should get some rest after lunch,” her dad said. “You don’t want to overdo things on your first day home.”
Annie frowned at him. “All I did was walk in from the car,” she protested. “Even at the hospital, they made me go in a stupid wheelchair. It was totally lame.”
Her dad grinned. “You didn’t seem to complain much at the time. I noticed the orderly was pretty cute.”
Annie rolled her eyes as she ate another bite of the sandwich, finishing off the little section. “Puh-leeze. Kenny’s, like, twenty-three. I’m pretty sure he flunked out of high school. That’s probably the best job he’ll ever have.”
“Nice to know you have high standards,” Ronnie teased. “Just don’t be too quick to judge people. You never know what hidden talents they might possess.”
“If Kenny has any talents, believe me, they’re hidden so deep no one will ever discover them,” she scoffed, then noticed that she’d absent-mindedly put another section of sandwich on her plate. Shrugging, she went ahead and took a bite.
“You sure about Kenny’s lack of talents?” her dad asked.
Annie studied him. “What do you know about him that I don’t?”
“Just that he’s a talented carpenter,” her dad said. “He’s been making furniture most of his life and selling it on consignment in a few galleries that specialize in hand-crafted pieces by local artisans. I predict you’ll hear big things about Kenny one of these days.”
Her mom looked as surprised as Annie felt.
“How do you know this?” Dana Sue asked.
“I actually took the time to talk to him,” Ronnie said. “He’s shy, not dumb.” He gave Annie a pointed look. “Another lesson, by the way.”
“Are you trying to fix me up with him or something?” she asked, after swallowing more food and chasing it down with unsweetened tea.
“Of course not,” her dad said at once. “He’s too old for you.”
“Then why are we even having this discussion?” she demanded, irritated that she’d missed the chance to get to know a guy who sounded a lot more interesting than she’d guessed. Maybe she was a snob, just the way her father had hinted without saying it.
“I think I know,” her mom said, regarding her dad with an amused expression. “He’s distracting you, so you won’t think about food. You’ll just eat it. Worked like a charm, too.”
Annie stared at her. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve eaten a whole sandwich, sweet pea.”
Annie stared at the plate and saw that all the sections were gone. Her dad might have scarfed down more than his share, but not all of them. And her mom didn’t even like turkey sandwiches.
“I ate a whole sandwich?” she asked, still doubtful even after her dad confirmed it with a pleased nod. But wouldn’t that have made her feel sick? Annie didn’t feel ill, though. She felt okay. She’d actually had a whole meal with other people and hadn’t freaked out. An odd sense of triumph washed over her. She grinned at her dad. “Cool. Sneaky, but cool.”
“I think that about sums up your dad,” her mom said, but she was laughing, so it didn’t sound mean at all.
Annie recalled a lot of meals around this table, and almost all of them had been like this, filled with teasing banter and some serious talk about life and stuff. She’d missed that more than anything when her dad had gone. Her meals with her mom, the few times they’d even bothered, had been silent and lonely, even with both of them sitting right here. Lately, her mom was at the restaurant most nights, and never had time to sit down and eat with Annie.
“I’m really glad you’re here,” she told her dad, not caring if it made her mom crazy to hear it. Maybe if her mom finally realized how much it meant to her to have her dad back in her life, she would do something to make sure he stayed.
“Me, too,” he told her. “I’ve missed being in Serenity.”
“Not just that,” Annie said, anxious to get her point across. “I meant here with us.”
“Annie…” her mom cautioned.
“I’m just saying it’s great he’s here.” Annie’s tone had a touch of belligerence. “That’s how I feel. Dr. McDaniels says I need to own my feelings.”
She stood up. “I’m going to take a nap now. Make sure I wake up way before everyone gets here, especially if we’re going to have dinner first. I want to look really nice so they won’t worry I’m gonna collapse or something.”
“I’ll make sure you’re up in plenty of time,” her mom promised.
Annie looked at her dad. “And you’ll still be here, right?”
“I’ll be here,” he confirmed.
“Couldn’t you just stay here?” she asked, knowing even as she posed the question that her mom was probably freaking out.
“I’m close by,” her dad said. “We’ll see each other all the time.”
Obviously, he wasn’t going to put her mom on the spot, but Annie wasn’t afraid to do it. And she thought she knew the perfect way to pull it off. She’d bring it up at tomorrow’s family counseling session. She had a feeling neither one of them would want to deny her what she wanted if she kicked up enough fuss about it with Dr. McDaniels. Okay, it was manipulative. But she could live with that if it pushed her mom and dad one step closer to getting back together. Sometimes adu
lts just needed a hard push to get them to do what they secretly wanted to do, anyway.
“Don’t even think about it,” Dana Sue muttered fiercely the instant Annie left the room.
“Think about what?” Ronnie inquired innocently, though he knew perfectly well what she was referring to.
“You’re not moving back in here and that’s final,” she said. “Not even for Annie’s sake.”
“She’s going to bring this up at that family counseling session tomorrow,” Ronnie predicted.
Dana Sue stared at him with alarm. “She wouldn’t dare.”
“Of course she would,” he said. “Didn’t you see that gleam in her eye? Our Annie is on a mission and she knows she has leverage.”
Dana Sue sank back in her chair, then reached for a spoon and began eating the remaining potato salad.
“Should you…” Ronnie began, only to fall silent at her withering look. She did toss the spoon back into the bowl, though.
“Well, this is one time she’s not getting her way,” Dana Sue said forcefully—though she didn’t look as if she believed that. “You’re just going to have to back me up on this.”
“What if I think she has a point?” he asked.
“Then you’re crazy,” she said bluntly. “It would be lunacy for you to move back in here under any circumstances.”
“There is a guest room,” he reminded her. “And I’m wasting money staying at the inn.”
“The guest room is about five hundred miles closer to my room than you ought to be,” she snapped. “Isn’t it time for you to go back to Beaufort or…or wherever you’ve been?”
“Afraid not,” he said. “I quit my job over there.”
She regarded him with dismay. “Why would you do that?”
“It wasn’t fair to ask them to hold it for me when I had no intention of going back.”
“But you have to go back,” she said, sounding desperate.
“Because?”
“You know perfectly well why. You cheated on me, Ronnie, and I will not have you underfoot every time I turn around, reminding me of that.”
Obviously this still wasn’t the right time to bring up the hardware store. “What do you suppose folks in Serenity remember most—that I cheated, or that you threw everything I own onto the front lawn and then chased me off before I could gather up half of it?”
She winced. “It’s probably a toss-up,” she said stubbornly, though they both knew that wasn’t true. People could forget a man’s foibles, but they weren’t likely to forget a woman in the throes of a very noisy revenge. A commotion like that made a lasting impression.
He grinned at her. “Care to take a poll?”
She stared at him. “What are you talking about?”
“Let’s go for a walk and ask everyone we pass what they remember most about the two of us.”
She shook her head. “You’re pathetic.”
“How is that pathetic?”
“You know there are only women home this time of day, and all you have to do is ooze a little of that charm of yours and they’ll all side with you. If you get really lucky, one of them might ask you to move in.”
“I thought women stuck together when it came to things like this.”
“They do,” she said, then amended, “Mostly. Look at Maddie, though. She’s already back to being your best buddy. She always was a sucker for that crooked smile of yours. At least Helen isn’t so easily duped.”
“Helen’s turning bitter about men,” Ronnie observed. “She needs to find the right one quick, before all those nasty divorces make her too cynical.”
Dana Sue bristled. “That’s a lousy thing to say.”
“Don’t tell me you haven’t thought the same thing,” he chided. “You’re too good a friend not to see what’s happening to her.”
Dana Sue sighed. “Okay, you have a point. She is a little jaded and she does need somebody in her life who can mellow her out. I just don’t know if the kind of man she needs can be found in Serenity.”
“She works all over the state,” Ronnie reminded her, relieved to have distracted Dana Sue from their own relationship for the moment. “Surely somewhere in South Carolina there’s an eligible man who’s smart enough and brave enough to take her on.”
“She does meet some nice men,” Dana Sue said. “She even fixed me up with a few of them.”
A streak of pure jealousy shot through Ronnie at the thought of Dana Sue with some stuffy, white-collar guy. “You and Helen don’t have the same taste in men,” he commented darkly.
“And look where that got me,” she retorted.
“More than twenty years of bliss, if you go back to high school,” he said, undaunted by the barb.
“And two years of pure misery,” she responded.
Ronnie bit back a smile. “If you’d given me half a chance, the misery wouldn’t have lasted that long.”
She balled up her napkin and threw it at him. “Not going to happen.”
“We’ll see,” he murmured. “We’ll see.”
Dana Sue might not want to admit it, but they were already making progress.
17
Dana Sue lingered in the dining room, her gaze caught by the sight of Ronnie and Cal off in a corner talking sports or something like old pals. Ronnie had never gotten along that well with Bill, Maddie’s first husband, despite having known him since high school. In fact, Ronnie had been the first to recognize that Bill was all wrong for Maddie. It turned out that his perception of Bill as selfish and unfeeling had been right on target.
Not that he’d ever spoken up, Dana Sue recalled. Not to Maddie, anyway. And he hadn’t wanted Dana Sue to share his impressions, either.
“Maddie’s married to him,” Ronnie had said on more than one occasion. “What I think of Bill doesn’t matter. For her sake, I’ll make the attempt to get along with him, the same way Helen does.”
At the time, Dana Sue had been surprised by the implication that Helen was no more enamored of Bill than Ronnie was. But it turned out that she, too, had been keeping quiet for Maddie’s sake. She’d never been nearly as reticent about Ronnie. Practically from the day they’d met, Helen had always expected the worst from him, and hadn’t kept silent about her fears.
Only Dana Sue had seen how Bill’s treatment of Maddie had bothered Ronnie. She had a hunch he was the only one of them who wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Bill was having an affair with a nurse in his office. But of course, by then, Ronnie had been gone.
Watching him now, she noticed that he didn’t seem to have the same kind of issues with Cal, despite the age difference between Cal and Maddie that had set tongues wagging all over town a year or so ago.
When Ronnie glanced up and caught Dana Sue looking his way, he winked. A few minutes later he crossed the room and joined her.
“You and Cal seem to have found a lot to talk about,” she said, not entirely sure how she felt about the two of them turning into pals. It would be just one more thread weaving Ronnie into the fabric of her life.
“I like him,” he said. “He’s grounded and down-to-earth. He adores Maddie and the new baby, and Ty, Kyle and Katie clearly look up to him. He’s obviously been good for all of them.”
“Then you approve of her choice this time?”
“Not that it’s my business, but yes. He told me Bill wanted Maddie back once his relationship with his nurse fell apart. Is that true?”
Dana Sue nodded. “Thank goodness Maddie turned him down. She’s been happier with Cal than she ever was with Bill.”
Ronnie searched the room till his gaze landed on Maddie. “She’s glowing, isn’t she? Marriage and being a new mom suit her. With the other kids, she just looked tired, probably because Bill expected her to deal with everything at home while he concentrated totally on his career. I doubt that man ever changed a diaper or stayed up with a sick kid, despite being a pediatrician.”
When Ronnie turned back to Dana Sue, his expression softened. “You were
beautiful when you were carrying Annie. You positively glowed.”
She regarded him doubtfully. “That must have been during the five seconds a day when I wasn’t throwing up.”
He stroked her cheek. “Don’t do that, Dana Sue.”
“Do what?”
“Put yourself down. You’re a gorgeous woman. Pregnancy only added to it.”
Dana Sue impulsively touched her rounded hips. “Now I have the extra pounds, but there won’t be any baby to show for them.”
Ronnie frowned at her. “I like the way you look.”
“Sure,” she scoffed. “Every man dreams of his wife gaining weight.”
He regarded her with obvious dismay. “I don’t get where this is coming from. Did you expect to be some tiny size your entire life, especially with your height? You look like a woman, Dana Sue. A healthy, attractive one who happens to have curves. If you ask me, that’s the way a woman ought to be.”
She wanted to believe him, wanted to see herself through his eyes, but all she could think about were the extra pounds she saw every time she stepped on the scale. There had been three more this morning. Having Ronnie back and getting under her skin had driven her to comfort food a little too often.
“You can’t mean that,” she protested.
Heat flared in his eyes and he stepped closer. Dana Sue instinctively backed up. He kept pace with her until her back hit the wall. There was no place left to go, and the determined glint in his eyes sent a shiver down her spine.
“You’re still the most desirable woman I’ve ever known,” he said quietly, his mouth hovering just over hers. “And I still want you.”
Dana Sue swallowed hard at the sincerity in his voice, which was accompanied by the darkening of his eyes. She knew that smoldering look, knew exactly where it usually led. But they had a houseful of people right now. Surely he wouldn’t…
With his hands on the wall on either side of her, trapping her in place, he leaned forward. Her mouth turned dry. When she opened it to utter a protest, his covered it. The shock of the kiss was familiar, the sensations ricocheting through her dangerous. Weak-kneed, she reached for him and held on for dear life as his tongue plundered and sent her head spinning.
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